Support New City Critics!

Announcing the launch of a campaign to create a new fellowship program empowering fearless and diverse voices to challenge the ways we design, plan, and develop our cities.

Cleaning Up?

Learning Environment

With origins in a massive underground oil spill, the new Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center is seeding future generations of neighborhood activists.

Peak Problems

New York City’s peaker plants are conspicuous emblems of a carbon-intensive energy economy — and its disastrous consequences.

Cleaning Up?

Staying Means Leaving

How do you respond to remediation when it falls short, again and again? For New Jersey's Ramapough Lunaape, mending the impacts of pollution on ancestral land means restoring health and indigenous culture on new ground.

Memory Loss

Roots of Memory

Less conspicuous and permanent than statues or sculptures, New York City’s memorial trees register histories that are personal, passed over, or in progress, from intimate loss to climate catastrophe.

Cleaning Up?

Hidden Maladies and Misplaced Remedies

Toxic industrial legacies — and their hazards — extend far beyond high-profile parcels. Measures to remediate them need to treat a broader urban landscape, too.

Cleaning Up?

Gasworks, Lost and Found

Manufactured gas plants disappeared from cityscapes long ago. In most cases, so did awareness of their toxic traces. Can neural networks now detect the hazardous remains that elude regulators?